Entertainment
pharyngula | April 26, 2007We have some musical talent among our readers. I was sent lyrics and a link to …
BRAINY PRIMATE BLUES words and music by Bruce Woollatt
Sometimes I wonder why
we ever left Olduvai.
It's a mystery to me
why we didn't stay in the trees.
Well a million years ago we should have thought the whole thing through
'cause a million years have gone and we've got those Brainy Primate Blues.
Listen to Brainy Primate Blues here.
pharyngula | April 23, 2007Remember: tonight, 8 PM EST, it's Richard Dawkins vs. Bill O'Reilly. It could be a disaster, it could be a triumph, it could be a comedy. I'm hoping I'll be back at home in time to catch it.
pharyngula | April 13, 2007Michael Alan Nelson, writer for the Fall of Cthulhu comics from Boom! Studios, sent me a couple of copies of the comic today, for some dark, mysterious reason. For a little context to this page, the two heroes have just witnessed a horrible suicide, and are going through the dead person's effects and computer files to try and figure out why he blew his brains out.
(click for larger image)
The "why" is apparently that he's been reading Pharyngula, in part. I know a few people who have that kind of reaction.
It's only a fleeting mention—he doesn't have me gibbering insanely and ripping open my…
pharyngula | April 11, 2007Abject fan of the old Hammer Horror movies that I am, I was thrilled to see this bit from the 1959 version of The Mummy. Our hero, John Banning (played by the always wonderful Peter Cushing), has gone to the home of the suspected villain, Mehemet Bey (George Pastell), to see if this recent arrival from Egypt is the person who dispatched the Mummy (Christopher Lee) to kill his father and uncle, and attempt to kill him. The way he chooses to probe for clues is to talk to Bey about … religion. And by golly, he sounds just like me. Bey gives the usual theistic excuses: but people are devoted to…
pharyngula | April 9, 2007Lucky Cambridge: a whole bunch of organizations, including Harvard, MIT, and the Cambridge public schools and libraries are collaborating to put on the Cambridge Science Festival—9 days of science activities around the town. That is exactly the kind of broadly supported activity in the service of science education that can make a difference in public perception. It's an excellent idea…now if only more communities had that kind of concentration of scientific organizations to make that kind of sustained activity possible.
(via Science Made Cool)
pharyngula | April 8, 2007The movie 300 has finally arrived in Morris, and I saw it last evening. I'd heard a lot about this film, in particular that it was loaded with relationships to current events—the war in Iraq, in particular, with arguments for it being pro-war, anti-war, a jingoistic propaganda film, etc. The arguments are all wrong. I could tell exactly what this movie's hidden meaning was: it's a retelling of the creation-evolution struggle! "But of course!" you're all saying to yourselves, "It's so obvious, now that you mention it!"
Look at the beginning. It's all about how the Spartans are the products of…
pharyngula | April 5, 2007
It's Thursday, 5 April, and you know what that means: today is the day of the Mutant Variety Show here in Morris! At 7:00 this evening, in the HFA recital hall, all of the local mutants will be exhibiting their bizarre phenotypes to the public. I'm very much looking forward to it, and anyone else in the region should swing on by.
Note: I am expecting mutants. I insist on mutants. If there are insufficient mutants to satisfy me* … well, I have an Illudium Q32 Explosive Space Modulator, and I'm not afraid to use it.
*Or at least a theremin.**
**I might settle for a kazoo. But that's rock-…
pharyngula | March 31, 2007Well, Skatje's going to Minicon next weekend—sending her off to hang out with intelligent nerds and geeks and people like Charles deLint and Lois McMaster Bujold and the Nielsen Haydens and Jane Yolen is probably the most responsible thing a parent can do. If any of my readers are also going, make sure she doesn't just go hide in her room and knit or chat on the computer. She needs to get out and socialize! Make friends! Watch Dr Who! Something!
Unfortunately, although I'll be providing the shuttle service to get her to and from the con, I'm going to be swamped with work for the next few…
pharyngula | March 25, 2007This evening, I caught most of some episodes of this series the Discovery Channel is airing, Planet Earth, which was advertised here for a while. It wasn't bad. It had some spectacular photography, did a great job of displaying a wide range of environments, and showed off some of the amazing abilities of animals very well. There were a few things that irritated me, though (I admit it, I criticize everything).
The biggest problem? It's a show for people with short attention spans. We got brief vignettes of a few minutes—you'd just be getting into the pumas and alpacas in Patagonia, and zip, we…
pharyngula | March 21, 2007In a good pirate movie, you need flamboyant excess, so I guess it's not surprising that the final installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is going to have every pirate in the world in a final climactic battle.
It's going to give every pirate fan an arrrrgasm, I think.
pharyngula | March 19, 2007Gary Farber has been collecting reviews of 300, the new movie about the Spartans at Thermopylae, and they certainly are amusing — I haven't seen the movie, but I suspect my opinion of it will be close to Howard Waldrop's and Lawrence Person's. I saw the trailer, and while the cartoonish style is to be expected given the source, the lack of historicity and indulgence in fantasy grates terribly. At least the kitsch is generating interesting reactions.
pharyngula | March 14, 2007Australian comedy may be a risky business — didn't they give us both Yahoo Serious and Barry Humphries?1 — but in case you want to chance it, I've been informed by Ben McKenzie, The Man in the Lab Coat, that he'll be doing a comedy lecture show about science this April.
Here's a cool thing: he has offered me comp tickets for the opening week. Since nobody is standing up to offer me comp flight tickets to Australia, or comp teaching stand-in to cover my classes while I'm away, he has said I can pass them on to any interested readers who might be willing to travel to Melbourne (surely there…
pharyngula | March 7, 2007
A recent article on Deep Sea News mentions the Ritual of 365 Points—since this is such an important reference to cephalophiliacs, I thought I'd repost my summary of a classic movie that hinges on it as a plot point.
I have seen The Calamari Wrestler. It was…indescribable. I won't even try. The basic idea, though, is that it's about pro wrestling in Japan, with a dying wrestler who undergoes a magical transformation in Pakistan to keep him alive, which also allows him to become a super-star in the ring. He battles rivals to learn a heartwarming secret at the end.
I've put a few frames below…
pharyngula | March 5, 2007A reader sent me a link to this myspace page (don't quail in horror just yet!) called Bark, Hide and Horn—it's by some folkies, and includes some songs. Love songs about mating molluscs and ants and various invertebrates! It's very romantic. Listen if you've long had a lingering suspicion that you were born into the wrong phylum, or if just appreciate love no matter what the species involved are.
Consider it some theme music for the Circus of the Spineless, which will be appearing right here later today.
pharyngula | March 4, 2007Last week, I promised I'd watch this documentary about the "lost tomb of Jesus" because it was being advertised here on Pharyngula. Promise fulfilled, but the ghastly program was two hours long—two hours of nothing but fluff. I've put a bit of a summary of the whole show below the fold, but I'm afraid there's nothing very persuasive about any of it, and it was stretched out to a hopelessly tedious length.
8:00-8:30
We learn that there were some ossuaries pulled out of a tomb in 1980. The names scrawled on them: Jesus bar Joseph, Jose, Mary, Matthew. They really didn't have to drag that out…
pharyngula | March 4, 2007Guess what period the History Channel characterizes as 600 years of degenerate, godless, inhuman behavior? Come on, guess!
The Dark Ages. Bunch o' brutal atheists running around covered in dirt and boppin' each other on the head with clubs is what it was, I guess. If you take a look at their timeline, they define the Dark Ages as the period from 410 AD, when Alaric of the Visigoths (Christian) sacked Rome (Christian), to 1095 when Pope Urban II (Christian, probably) sent an armed mob of knights and hangers-on (Christian) to savage the people of the Middle East (Muslim, mainly). In between, we…
pharyngula | March 3, 2007Some of you may recall that I got rather cranky with some sensitive Catholics who wanted to cancel a play — "The Pope and the Witch", currently playing on the Twin Cities campus. Unfortunately, although we'd hope to go, we had this succession of snowstorms that made traveling impractical this past week (I may still go at the end of this coming week, since the last day of the play coincides with the last day of classes before spring break and my birthday). Anyway, the Twin Cities Pioneer Press picked up on it. I put the article below the fold to preserve the fact that they quoted me, and to…
pharyngula | February 28, 2007A new movie about Darwin is in the works—
Jeremy Thomas is set to produce Annie's Box about Charles Darwin, and hiring John Collee to write and directed by Jon Amiel.
The film will be based on a biography of Darwin by Randall Keynes, the great-great grandson of the Victorian scientist. Variety notes it focuses on the period when Darwin was writing The Origin of the Species, his ground-breaking treatise on evolution, while living a family life at Down House in Kent, near London.
The 'Annie' of the title is Darwin's first daughter, whose death aged 10 left him grief-stricken. With his…